“The ice cake is breaking up. There—it goes again,” groaned Goritz.
Another report, louder, keener, like a gun shot, was heard above the babel of noises that the wind, the waters now and the straining boat, not to speak of the cargo on the deck, rustled and scraped throughout its many joints and the crevices between the boxes, promiscuously raised. There was a pause, then came another report that made us all jump to the door; it seemed almost as if the launch were cracking beneath our feet. It was a detonation directly below us. Outside the wailing, demoniacal storm was raging. Our cargo, thanks to its unbreakable anchorage to the deck, seemed safe, but on all sides of us was water, laden with ice blocks that beat trip-hammer blows against the sides of the launch. OUR DOGS WERE LOST!
No, not all. Ten had struggled from their confinement in the snow and had taken refuge on the boat. The rest, swallowed up in the sundering of the raft, had perished in the foaming sea. The boat was tossing, and the waves would have swamped us had not the watertight door of the cabin house been shut. She was drifting helplessly amid the ice-strewn billows, whose retreating slopes were sheeted white with a lather of foam. We were holding onto anything convenient, and were drenched, but finally Goritz and Hopkins found their way somehow with the agility and tenacity of cats to the stern, and shipped the rudder, and in a few moments—they seemed hours—we were in line with the wind, and racing before it, lifted and shot onward by the waves that, luckily for us, were not dangerously crested, but were peaked hills of water, whose ebullitions were somewhat suppressed by the masses of ice distributed over them. We seemed like playthings, and like playthings the giant of the deep tossed us on, thus humorously willing to aid us to our destination if we could stand the treatment.
The storm would half subside and then, as if maddened at its clemency, would renew its violence. As Hopkins put it, “She certainly can come back good and hearty, gets her second wind and takes a right hook, just as if nothing had happened. But after all it’s no raw deal. We’re covering ground fine, and not turning a hair to pay for it, provided we can hold together. The insides of the weather man are hard to fathom, and he has never been credited with too big a supply of the milk of human kindness, but if he isn’t putting it over us hard with a goldbrick, it looks to me as if we might soon expect to run up against the revenue cutter of the Krocker port. I suppose we can declare these goods as essential to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and beat the duty.”
It grew lighter on the third day, and the awful tumult lapsed suddenly into a peacefulness amazing and ideal. The temperature rose and the skies cleared, the sun was unclouded and intensely brilliant for these latitudes, and, most glorious of all, the ocean was clear of ice, only the green rolling waves sweeping over the limitless distances, flattening out against that magic circle where sky and water meet, and where we half expected to see the emergent peaks of mountains.
And the next days were wonder days. The air was even balmy; the sea, cleared of its litter of ice, invited us with green gleaming undulations to tempt its mercies still farther. Our engine was started, and the “Pluto,” albeit a little slowly, forged on, and later, aided by a sail that drew every wind that stirred, advanced over the ocean, with even a flattering pretence to speed; her safeness had been assumed at the start.
Except for the destruction of our dogs whom we had already begun to admire and to cherish, nothing seemed wanting for our perfect peace of mind except a little more confidence that this unknown world, now rapidly approaching, would offer us a decent foothold; that it would not be an ice-buried continent, the asylum of all the terrors of the north, awful in its solitude, remorseless in its scorn, brutal in its revenge. Well, the Professor undertook to calm our doubts, and while he exerted his culinary skill in the infinite variety of combinations of soups, canned fruits, preserves, bread, cake, biscuits, candy, pemmican, wine, custards, pie and macaroni, he expended a more valuable art in convincing us that we were indeed to discover a pleasant country, and was not averse to beguiling us into raptures over his fabulous pictures of its possibilities—“spinning yarns” and “pipe dreams,” Hopkins contemptuously styled them.
“My friends,” said the Professor, sprinkling dried raisins into the yellow dough which would later be transformed into a delectable cake, “this Krocker Land has been the dream of ages. It is the ancient Eden, and it is preserved to us in the records of prehistoric men who have retained the childhood stories of still more ancient peoples. Relatively it is a legend because no one has seen it. In reality it will establish the unity of tradition, as it ought,” and so on and on, with some new notions of the oblateness of the earth’s form, and the fact that at the north we were some thirteen miles nearer the earth’s center, and then some more about the unequal distribution of the interior fluid masses of rock, and the great probability that such unsolidified magmas, radiating great heat, might occur in the boreal regions of the earth’s crust to produce local warmth. But of course his great point was the depression idea. He harped incessantly on that.
“It looks to me,” said Hopkins as we sat round our little mess table in the cabin, “that if the going stays good, and the food lasts, we surely will get there. Holes are, however, dangerous things, and Americans don’t relish getting into them too deep. The grub question is important. We’ve stacks of it just now, but this invincible habit of eating is getting the best of it, and starvation is a most inglorious death. Do you think, Professor, that this Krocker Land has got any live stock on it?”
The pained expression, of having been wounded in the house of a friend, that came over the Professor’s face, as he wiped his mouth and reluctantly paused in his consumption of a ham sandwich was very delightful.